n omnibus or carriage and butt into me furiously. She holds
her umbrella in her folded arms just as the Punch puppet does his staff,
and with as deadly effect. Sometimes she discards her customary navy
blue and puts on a glittering bonnet with bead trimmings, and goes and
hurts people who are waiting to enter the pit at theatres, and
especially to hurt me. She is fond of public shows, because they afford
such possibilities of hurting me. Once I saw her standing partly on a
seat and partly on another lady in the church of St. George's, Hanover
Square, partly, indeed, watching a bride cry, but chiefly, I expect,
scheming how she could get round to me and hurt me. Then there was an
occasion at the Academy when she was peculiarly aggressive. I was
sitting next my lame friend when she marked me. Of course she came at
once and sat right upon us. "Come along, Jane," I heard her say, as I
struggled to draw my flattened remains from under her; "this gentleman
will make room."

My friend was not so entangled and had escaped on the other side. She
noticed his walk. "Oh, don't _you_ get up," she said. "_This_
gentleman," she indicated my convulsive struggles to free myself, "will
do that. _I did not see that you were a cripple._"

It may be some of my readers will recognise the lady now. It can be--for
the honour of womankind--only one woman. She is an atavism, a survival
of the age of violence, a Palaeolithic squaw in petticoats. I do not know
her name and address or I would publish it. I do not care if she kills
me the next time she meets me, for the limits of endurance have been
passed. If she kills me I shall die a martyr in the cause of the Queen's
peace. And if it is only one woman, then it was the same lady, more than
half intoxicated, that I saw in the Whitechapel Road cruelly
ill-treating a little costermonger. If it was not she it was certainly
her sister, and I do not care who knows it.

What to do with her I do not know. A League, after all, seems
ineffectual; she would break up any League. I have thought of giving her
in charge for assault, but I shrink from the invidious publicity of
that. Still, I am in grim earnest to do something. I think at times that
the compulsory adoption of a narrow doorway for churches and places of
public entertainment might be some protection for quiet, inoffensive
people. How she would rage outside to be sure! Yet that seems a great
undertaking.

But this little paper is not so much a